Keep the good ideas coming with innovation management

You know that innovation is a primary driver of success. Look at the biggest names in business today, especially those that have been around for many decades, and you’ll see they all have one thing in common, regardless of industry: these companies innovate constantly, and consistently.

In today’s market, successfully managing corporate ideas is crucial to sustainable, long-term success. But with more employees and business partners, how can you improve your company’s corporate innovation?

You can begin by really understanding what corporate innovation means.

WHAT IS CORPORATE INNOVATION, AND HOW DO YOU MANAGE IT?

Start by defining corporate innovation as a method of managing, validating, and implementing concepts that improve a company. Innovations impact different sides of your business, whether it’s your internal processes, products, or business model. Companies that practice effective innovation management experience operational efficiency, provide more customer value, and as a result, grow faster than their competitors.

The trick is, of course, knowing and following proven innovation management practices. As industries differ, so do the benefits. Companies that stick to essential corporate innovation strategies deliver up to 2.4 times more economic profits than less mature businesses.

Here are the best practices for managing innovation:

• Set realistic goals: Do your innovation initiatives align with your business model? Are these goals tangible and realistic enough to stimulate action?
• Balance your innovation portfolio: Do you divide your company’s initiatives into different types based on the required investments, implementation complexity, and associated risks?
• Implement with scale in mind: Do you factor-in how many resources your projects will require as they evolve?
• Maintain cross-functional collaboration: Does your governance process facilitate idea sharing? Do you have an effective development methodology?
• Develop business alliances: Do you gather innovation from different sources? Do you work with innovative partners who share your goals?
• Incentivize your employees: How do you motivate your team to pursue innovative projects and share their knowledge?
• Define team roles: Does your team consist of people with different cultural, educational, or linguistic backgrounds? Do you appoint roles to employees based on how they behave in a group?
• Update your technical stack. Do you maintain an efficient and up-to-date application portfolio? Do you provide your team with enough training, so they can leverage the latest technologies to the fullest?
• Measure innovation success. What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) do you use to benchmark your innovation initiatives?

CORPORATE IDEA MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK

Here’s another thing that successful companies have in common. Effective corporate idea management also requires a defined process and clear decision pathways.

You can divide this framework into five stages:

1. Challenges: Research your target audience, business processes, and the market to identify innovation opportunities and problems.
2. Ideation: Use employee crowdsourcing and brainstorming sessions to find ways to solve these problems.
3. Validation: Assess the validity, profitability, and technical feasibility of your assumptions.
4. Implementation: Turn concepts into products and business models to see how well they perform.
5. Measurement: Analyze how the project impacts your company.

Establishing an idea-sharing process can take years, especially in larger companies. Fortunately, you can streamline it with collaboration tools like SoftServe’s Innovation Management Platform.

SoftServe’s platform encourages your internal teams and business partners to innovate collectively. They can share ideas, vote on those that are the most interesting, run custom validation tests, and follow the implementation progress. You can also track successful and failed assumptions to avoid testing similar ideas repeatedly. Our platform's trial version is free for the first 30 days.

For more information on successful innovation management and proven practices, read our White Paper.